General Discussion • Re: Flash vs. Ruffle

Is anyone clearer as to why NPAPI came to be identified only with Flash before the major browsers restricted support just to it? As long as i was on Windows 7, I used Java, Shockwave, Sumatra PDF (replacing Acrobat) and VLC (replacing Windows Media Player). I never used Silverlight myself, but I know of its reputation. The decline in broader plug-in usage presumably preceded the browser changes, unless deprecating NPAPI was entirely just another of Google’s follies, which would not surprise me at all if so.

There's probably a ton of legacy stuff in there (the original product was by Macromedia, which Adobe acquired in 2007) so who knows what kind of software patents or other licensing issues might have to be resolved before releasing it, and that also costs money to do.

This is why Microsoft has liberated only selected versions of MS-DOS, despite the fact that FreeDOS’s existence for decades has made the deed purely of historical interest. One can only hope that the source code will survive into next century, when the USA’s 95-year cap on copyrights will free them.